The Linux kernel added a new kernel parameter called swappiness to let administrators tweak the way Linux swaps. It is a number from 0 to 100.In essence, higher values lead to more pages being swapped, and lower values lead to more applications being kept in memory, even if they are idle.The swappiness parameter controls the tendency of the kernel to move processes out of physical memory and onto the swap disk.

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Swap space is the area on a hard disk which is part of the Virtual Memory of your machine, which is a combination of accessible physical memory (RAM) and the swap space. Swap space is used when your system decides that it needs physical memory for active processes and there is insufficient unused physical memory available.

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Linux kernel 2.4 and later can handle multiple swap spaces up to 32 swap space, If you use multiple swap files and partitions and you want to prioritize which spaces are used first, you can do it by altering the priority no of swap files and partitions to boost the virtual memory. By default the priorities are assigned in the order that the swap spaces are added, where -1 is a higher priority number than -2.